The end of sleep Jesse Gamble | Aeon | 10 April 2013 Imagine a disease that deprived people of a third of their conscious lives. We would be clamouring for a cure. We don’t have a cure for sleep yet: take 400mg of modafinil every eight hours, and you can sleep just one night in three. A mild version of electroshock therapy cuts the optimal nightly sleep time down from eight hours to four. As to what we would do with the extra waking hours, science is silent.

A history of like Robert Gehl | New Inquiry | 27 March 2013 I missed this when it was first published; all the more reason to return to it now for a read. Facebook has turned “liking” into a driving force of social media and commerce. But why “like”? All is explained here. “The marketing subfield of Liking Studies, which began before Internet use became mainstream, is key to understanding how this somewhat bland, reductive signal of affect became central to the larger consumer economy we live in. It also explains why Facebook will never install a Dislike button.”

Cognitive biases and the trouble with local shopping Jon Wilkins | Lost In Transcription | 4 April 2013 On the informational advantages that large businesses have over small ones. For example: Starbucks knows from A/B testing that unlimited wifi is better for business than metered wifi. An independent coffee shop can only guess what kind of wifi to offer, if any, and will probably guess wrong, worrying that unlimited wifi will attract freeloaders. The puzzle is, why don’t more small firms copy the practices of big ones, however counterintuitive these might seem, knowing that the big firms have already run the numbers?

Medical emergencies at 40,000 feet Celine Gounder | The Atlantic | 4 April 2013 Airlines are woefully underprepared for onboard medical emergencies, writes a doctor who has had to cope with several of them. Common in-flight medical events include dizziness, fainting, diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting. Sometimes things get more serious, like heart attacks, seizures, and strokes. “I never take sedatives on flights because I feel like on almost every other international flight they ask if there's a doctor on board."

For more articles worth reading, visit The Browser. If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.